The Coupe at "Fiery Furnace"
Landscape Arch -- this is gonna collapse soon!
Partition Arch. I didn't realize I'd climbed so high!
Hummer -- first big climb. It's steeper and rockier than it looks!
The view from the shotgun seat
That's Phil. Would you trust him? :-)
"White Knuckle" -- Phil was too wimpy to try this :-)
Ouch! (Don't worry, no feet were harmed in the making of this web page)
Our fearless leader and his steed
Slickrock as far as the eye can see
See? I was actually there. (That's my foot up there, too)
So I headed up to Arches to finish what I'd started yesterday. I went into the park and skipped the entire first half. I really wanted to get a hike in before the heat of the day, so I did a couple of quick stops at some scenic spots, but went all the way in to the end of the main road, the "Devil's Garden" area, where there were some recommended hikes.
I ended up hiking about 3.5 miles, not that far. But it was getting really hot and I didn't want to kill myself. My plan was to get back to the campground, eat some lunch, go for a quick (but not very exerting) mountain bike ride, take a shower, head back into town to upload yesterday's journal web site, and then meet the Hummer at the information center for the sunset tour.
So, the hike was great. It was pretty hot out and there isn't much shade available near noon with the sun high overhead, but the scenery was at least as spectacular as yesterday's. I took a gazillion pictures, but have only included a select few here to prevent having to upload too many. One thing I noticed -- there are many more Europeans enjoying our natural landscape than Americans. They obviously know something we don't. I think American's take way too much for granted.
Got back to the campground at about 12:45. I was starved, so I made myself a sandwich, and then somehow found myself mapping out the circuit breakers in the RV instead of going for a ride. I'm terrible. The big problem is the lack of a bike rack for the BMW. I swear, if I'd solved that problem before I left, I'd be a riding animal :-) Still, I really want to ride.
Anyway, by the time I realized that I'd missed my slot for doing a ride, it was too late. I gathered up stuff to go back into town for uploading the web site, and warm clothes and such in case we were out in the Hummer late and it got cold (we weren't, and it didn't), and hit the road again.
There's a computer store in town that has a desk at which you can sit and use their phone line (they also have computers there so you can surf if you don't have one, etc). They charge a whopping $0.65 for each 5 minutes, and although I used 11 minutes downloading e-mail, sending my unsent e-mail, and uploading the web site and pictures, they only charged me for 5 minutes. What a bargain!
I then grabbed some ice cream (sherbet actually -- the ice cream quality was lacking, says this self-proclaimed ice cream snob) and met the Hummer at the information center.
Phil, the driver/guide, got there just moments before me. He had a nice white Hummer with a canvas roof over the seats, and a jumpseat mounted in the back, with no roof overhead. The only other Hummer I've ever been in was a fully-enclosed hardtop.
Phil is this very young-looking (I didn't ask his age, but he's probably reading this so maybe he'll fill me in) California surfer-dude lookalike, but he's from Provo, UT. Does these Hummer tours, rafting tours, and works at ski areas (and REI) in the winter. I wish I'd done things like that, not that I mind the money I earned :-)
Anyway, we waited for our other two people joining us, a pair of Germans from Berlin, whose names I sadly have already forgotten, only a few hours later. They arrived soon, and we were off. A quick stop for some diesel, and we headed south, away from town.
I asked if we were going to do some "real" off-roading, or if we were just going to be on dirt roads. Phil was insulted :-) He assured me I'd be scared (I was scared only once, more on that later).
The Hummer is a *terrible* street car. It's really loud, you sit really far apart, so you have to yell at your companion to be heard. The hood shakes violently at 60mph (near top speed). I can't imagine what people who spend north of $80K on these for the street are thinking.
Then we missed the dirt road. We turned around and went to it, and I see how he missed it -- it's hardly obvious. There are lots of dirt turnoffs. It reminds me of trying to find the road to Altar Rock on Nantucket -- who knows which dirt road you're supposed to take? Nothing's marked, after all.
We pulled onto the dirt, he stopped and put it into "4-low" (which was quite an effort -- no push-button 4WD on this beast!), and we headed towards the hills. He also let some air out of the tires by pushing a dash-mounted switch. Kind of cool. Down to only 25psi, but since the thing weighs something like 10,000 pounds, I guess you still use lots of air off-road. It wasn't long before we were already into things that a stock SUV could never handle. It was mostly dirt, sometimes loose, sometimes smooth rock, and sometimes majorly technical rock outcroppings. The ability to lock the differentials just by using both gas and brake at the same time, and the very slow crawling speed and diesel power at idle made these really tough maneuvers seem easy though. Phil's also pretty darned good at driving off-road. I have no idea if I could have managed it, though he sure made it look easy.
Nothing seemed to phase the Hummer at all. The ground clearance was amazing, the huge width made it never really feel like it was even close to tipping over (something I can't say about the 4WD excursions I did in Dan Applebaum's 4-Runner, or even worse, Mike Monegan's Trooper), and the long wheelbase ... basically, it seemed like you just point it where you want to go and drive really slowly, and you'd be okay. There were lots of times when I thought we'd scrape something underneath, but we never did. The only contact with the environment, other than the tires, where the times when the mirrors or the brush guard would hit some plant life on the sides of the road.
We did get to one intersection. Phil said that the side road went to a spot called "White Knuckle." Sounds like a double-black-diamond ski run, doesn't it? Instead, we went the "easy" way. I don't know if it had a name but I think it would qualify at least single-black, if not double-black. When we got to the other side, I took some pictures of White Knuckle.
We finally reached some (relatively) smooth and fast dirt fire roads, and headed off to "Prostitute Butte." How's that for a name?
After the photo op, we started to head back. Of course, our route took us over some sand dunes, on which Phil demonstrated that you can, in fact, get a Hummer sideways and spray lots of sand off of all four tires simultanously. I would have loved to drive that part.
Then we ended up back on the main road and headed back towards Moab. But we weren't done. We headed up into the hills on the other side of the road (actually, towards the "Slickrock Trail", the MTB trail I want to do). The goal was to get up to the top of the hills and catch the sunset.
We turned off the paved road and climbed what I'll call a one-lane arch. Imagine that you're sitting at ground level, and right in front of you is this 10-foot-wide balance beam. But it's not flat -- it goes up maybe 100 feet, crests at the top, and then goes back down to to ground level on the other side.
This was the only time I was scared. It seemed like if you didn't go perfectly straight, you'd drive right off the side! But it wasn't really as narrow as I've made it sound, and Phil and the Hummer made easy work of it. It was slickrock, so it's really grippy even though it's steep.
Then we forded a big puddle (after Phil told us to make sure that all of our doors were fully closed!) and headed to this mountain range of rock. It was spectacular. Unfortunately, we got to the top just a touch too late to catch the sunset. Oh well. We did see it from one spot but it wasn't really the spot we wanted to be, and who really cares when you don't have someone there to share the romanticism of the sunset? So, we headed over to another higher summit, where I took some more pictures. This was a huge slickrock ocean, just peak after peak of rounded-top stone. It was gorgeous. Hopefully the pictures do it justice.
Then, back to the info center, and back to camp. Had some dinner, and started typing this up. It turned out very long! I took over 60 pictures today, but I'll try to keep the number down so this page doesn't take forever to load ...
I just plotted out the rest of the journey between here and Topeka. It seems to me that my options are:
- Leave here in the morning, stop at one interesting thing in Colorado, spend the night somewhere (say, Pikes Peak), drive up the Pikes Peak road Thursday morning, then head to Topeka, and arrive either late Thursday night or early Friday morning
- Spend the morning here, and do a MTB ride, then make it to, say, Glenwood Springs for the night. Thursday, stop at a few interesting things that are truly along the way (not like Pikes Peak) and make it to western KS Thursday night, and pull into Topeka Friday
- Spend the morning here, head to Colorado, stop at something more interesting than what I can find along I-70, and maybe make it to eastern CO Thursday night, then pull into Topeka Friday afternoon